Gray-New Gloucester High School

Zoom connection

Carol Clark, Instrumental Music Director at Gray-New Gloucester High School, recently shared a wonderful story about a zoom meeting that she arranged with someone many of you music educators may know. Below is the exciting story in Carol’s own words. Thank you Carol for sharing!

World renown composer, conductor and lecturer, Dr. Bruce Pearson, joined the Gray-New Gloucester High School Concert Band via Zoom. Although he lives in Minnesota, Dr. Pearson has had considerable impact on our students’ musical development, as many learned from his instrumental music methods. In our high school band, we typically began our class sessions with his Technique & Musicianship exercises and chorales. Now, during remote learning, they continue to work with this method at home. Dr. Pearson spent an hour talking to our students, answering questions about his life, music and the creative processes of composing and arranging. We all had a great time learning from such a kind, knowledgeable and creative teacher!

Here is a link to his website:  http://brucepearsonmusic.com/about-bruce/

From our students:

*  It was good to be able to hear Dr. Pearson’s answers to our questions. I think hearing his story and a bit of his composing process was helpful. It was also just really cool to be able to hear what he had to say, since he wrote the books that we’ve been using in band since 5th grade. Thank you.

*  I found this class interesting and informative, and I’m so glad we could do it! It was fun to hear from someone on the other side of the music we play in band, and to have some ideas and direction for approaching composing, which is something I have been interested in recently. Thank you for the opportunity!